


Thumpety thump thump

by pollyrepeat



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Feelstide, Frosty the goddamn Snowman, M/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-07
Updated: 2013-12-07
Packaged: 2018-01-02 20:20:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1061189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pollyrepeat/pseuds/pollyrepeat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint is on a desperate mission to commandeer everyone's freezer space. Phil is in desperate need of a freezer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thumpety thump thump

**Author's Note:**

> For Feelstide Prompt 84. "Unusual Fix-It: Phil comes back to life as a snowman. Clint and the team have to figure out a way to return him to human form before he melts."

Owning a gas station was not as glamorous as it was cracked up to be.

Third shift was Mya’s least-favorite, and therefore the one she most frequently worked herself: the sleepy lull of a mid-week mid-afternoon, when everyone was at work and not on the road, and the rotating cast of teenagers on staff were all at school. She was leaning over her laptop during on of these interminable third shifts, willing the wireless to kick back in and let her reload Netflix, when a man slammed shoulder-first into the door. He pin-wheeled wildly to catch his balance when it opened more easily than he’d obviously expected. The bell tinkled, belatedly.

He spun a full circle in the middle of the floor while she said, “Can I ... help ... you?” There was a gun under the counter and it seemed, suddenly, hugely out of reach. 

“Ice,” the man gasped. “Oh, god. I need your freezer. I need all your freezer space. I need you to move all your ice cream _right now_ , do these shelves come out? Never mind,” he added, taking three fast steps to the side, flinging open a freezer door and slamming his elbow vigorously into the shelf at chest-level. It didn’t stand a chance.

“You have huge arms,” she said, to pass the time while she waited for her brain to come back from the shocked little walkabout it had gone on as soon as the man had come in. A pint of ice cream rolled to a stop at her feet. Worst stress response ever; Angie _still_ called her Myo, instead of Mya. Myo for _myotonic goat_ , that most beautiful and noble creature which freezes and falls over when panicked.

“All the better,” the man grunted -- SLAM -- “to save-” SLAM “-my--” SLAM “--oh. Hey, these freezers have a back-door?”

“They’re a walk-in,” she said, faint. “Extra storage in the back. Our deliveries are ... infrequent.”

“ _Perfect_ ,” the man breathed, reverently, and way, way more stoked about freezer-space than anyone Mya had ever seen.

He sprinted out the door.

Mya’s hand finally found the gun under the counter, and fumbled it out of its hiding space. “Nine-one-one,” she chanted, searching her pockets, “cell phone, nine-one-one --”

The bell over the door tinkled again, and a huge mass of snow waddled in. There was a carrot nose, covered in the teeth marks of tiny animals and missing its tip. There were two gleaming black buttons, one drooping alarmingly down its ... face. There was a shabby black tie, twisted at a jaunty angle and doing nothing to mitigate the general air of creepiness.

“Can ... can I help you,” Mya said, clutching at the counter to keep herself upright. She thought, wildly, of the gun under her hand, but she was pretty sure snowblobs didn’t have internal organs. What if shooting it just made it angry!

The snow-thing waved its little stick arms in the air, as if distressed, its licorice mouth twisting unhappily, and then the man was back. He did a complicated sort of hover-dance around the snowman, trying to shoo it towards the freezer without actually touching it. The snowman squelched obligingly past the ice cream and into the walk-in, but when the man closed the door behind it, one of the stick arms clattered urgently, angrily, against the side.

“You’re gonna be okay,” the man said. He had the slightly glassy-eyed look of someone determined to power through an increasingly incomprehensible situation, and it was this -- and the way he put his palm flat against the freezer so the snowman could bump its stick-fingers against it, through the window -- that made Mya slide the gun back under the counter.

“Can I help you,” Mya said, one last time. This one came out a little stronger than the previous two, and the man turned around and seemed at last to see her, really see her. He looked at Mya, then back at the freezer, then back at Mya, and then he said, “Can I borrow your phone?”

Mya decided that he could. The snowman made a moaning, slushy sound when the man moved toward the counter, hand out for her cellphone, which was also when the slightly squashed features and the enormous arms and the sandy hair resolved themselves into those of Hawkeye, mysterious alien-killer and frequent feature of tabloid covers.

She dropped the phone.

The snowman moaned again, and Hawkeye darted back, made a soothing noise in his throat while leaning his forehead against the glass. “I’ll be right back, sir, I promise. It’s okay. You’re safe in there.”

From floor-level, the bottom-shelf rack of tabloids, all featuring a grainy, pixelated version of Hawkeye drinking a coffee while wandering down the street, stared accusingly at her. “Phone?” Real Life Hawkeye called, holding out his hand. He seemed reluctant to move away from the freezer again, and Mya obligingly stood and inched her way over to his side. “Thanks.”

Mya stared unabashedly at the snowman while Hawkeye dialed a number and slumped against the freezer. “I’ve got Phil,” he said, almost gasping it. “Nat, I’ve got him.”

A customer came in the door -- she must have pulled up for gas while Mya was distracted -- and promptly wiped out on the slick of water that led from the outside all the way to the freezer. 

“No, I didn’t rob his -- I didn’t steal his _body_ ,” Hawkeye said, sounding scandalized. He glanced back at the snowman in the freezer, and added, “Really not his body. He’s _alive_ , Nat, he’s not dead at all, he’s --”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Mya called to the woman on the floor, feeling strangely emboldened with Hawkeye at her back. “We’re having a snowman issue.”

“That’s ... okay?” the woman said, sounding not at all sure that it was. She stared at Hawkeye’s arms, and then past him, at the thing in the freezer.

“I’ll pay for her gas,” Hawkeye said, waving a hand in a shooing motion. “I’ll pay for your gas,” he called, louder, and then into the phone, said, “No, I’m in the middle of nowhere. A gas station. Do you know how hot it is here? TOO HOT. I need a quinjet, and I need ... dry ice? And a portable freezer. Cold things. And then a -- is there a magician on the index? We need one of those.”

Mya helped the woman up while Hawkeye shouted into her phone and the snowman made sad, inquisitive noises behind his back. “Sorry about that,” Mya said, again. “But hey, free gas. Isn’t that nice?”

“BECAUSE HE CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD AS GODDAMN FROSTY THE SNOWMAN,” Hawkeye said. “No, don’t call --”

The woman sped out the door without looking back, and Mya, for lack of better things to do, went to grab the mop. Hawkeye made an alarmed face when she started to clean up the water, though, so she wrung it out into a bucket under his watchful eye, and carried it over to the freezer.

The snowman was staring at her. Probably. It was hard to tell, with the button eyes. This was more snow than Mya had seen all at once in years and years; it had snowed only a handful of times in recent memory. “I have your ... drippings,” Mya told it. “I’ll just put them in the freezer with you, if that’s okay?”

“His name is Phil,” Hawkeye said, voice wavering into a break when he hit the name. “He won’t hurt you, but he needs the cold. Please be fast.”

She shoved the bucket in so quickly that the water sloshed against the sides. "Loki," Hawkeye said into the phone, switching from upset to pissed off. "ALSO not dead, and yes, that's how I travelled six hundred miles in two minutes."

The snowman -- Phil -- leaned over to inspect the bucket. If snowmen were capable of looking unimpressed, this would be it. 

"Thank you," Hawkeye said into the phone. "Got it," he added. "One hour. _Thank_ you, Tasha.” He hung up with great finality, heaved a sigh of what seemed to be relief, then handed Mya’s phone back over and turned to look her in the eye. “What’s your name?”

“Mya,” she said, feeling herself start to blush, embarrassingly, under the full weight of his attention.

“Thanks, Mya,” he said, utterly, terrifyingly, sincere. “Would you mind closing up shop for, say, an hour? Taking a coffee break? I promise we’ll -- I’ll reimburse you for it. You won’t get in trouble with your boss. I’m good for it.”

“It’s okay,” she said. She didn’t quite have the heart to tell him that she _was_ the boss. The snowman had abandoned its contemplation of the bucket and was tapping its stick-limbs against the glass again, rhythmic, like the morse code she and Angie had learned and tapped out when they were kids. “I know you are.”

Her last glimpse of Hawkeye, as she was locking up, was of him opening the freezer door and settling down on the ground inside, speaking in a soothing tone of voice too quiet for her to make out individual words. 

The snowman, ever-so-gently, reached out with one of its stick-arms to pet his hair.

//

Her little gas station got a bit of a reputation, afterwards. That was the inevitable result of ominous black planes descending from the sky, and people in hazmat suits swarming the area, and a bank teller from the town down the road having a very interesting and unbelievable story about things glimpsed in freezers.

Business was booming, obviously.

She was leaning against the counter, magazine in hand, taking advantage of a brief, midday lull in customer traffic, when a man in a suit walked in the door. He bumped his shoulder against one of the freezer doors in a friendly and incomprehensible sort of way, and wandered around to the back, in and out of sight behind the shelves.

When the man emerged from the shelves, hands full of plastic-wrapped food, something about his face clicked in Mya’s brain.

He waited patiently while Mya glanced, inexorably, from his face to the stack of Avengers-themed tabloids next to her elbow on the counter. “HAWKEYE AND NEW MYSTERY LOVER,” the top one declared. “INSIDE SOURCES SAY BLACK WIDOW HEARTBROKEN.” There he was on the cover: one hand wrapped around Hawkeye’s wrist, one of Hawkeye’s hands in the man’s thinning hair. They looked nice together, she’d thought. They looked as though lover was the right word.

She looked back up at the man.

“Hello,” he said. He stuck two packages of donuts on the counter. “Couldn’t decide,” he said, and smiled at her.


End file.
